Erica Bernheim was born in New Jersey and grew up in Ohio and Italy, and educated at Miami University, Selwyn College, Cambridge, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is currently earning a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Iowa Review, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, the Canary, Black Warrior Review, and she is the author of the chapbook, "Between the Room and the City."

Krista Franklin is a poet, visual artist and educator who hails from Dayton, OH, and currently works and resides in Chicago, IL. Her poems and art have appeared in/on several literary journals and websites, including Nexus Literary and Art Journal, Warpland, Obsidian III, nocturnes 2: (re)view of the literary arts, semantikon.com, milkmag.org, ambulant.org, and errataandcontradiction.org. She has also been published in the anthologies The Bust Guide to the New Girl Order and Bum Rush The Page, and is a Cave Canem alum.

Nancy Ferguson is a native Chicagoan, and recent graduate of Northwestern University's MA in Creative Writing. Her fiction has appeared in Blithe House Quarterly and other journals.

Tracie D. Hall began her tour of duty in south Los Angeles and was stationed in Seattle and New Haven before docking in Chicago. Though she has received several awards and fellowships for her poetry, among her most urgent goals are acquiring a small farm and being cast as the "Miss November" pin-up in the Hot Librarians of North America calendar. She also hopes to be invited to catalog Lil Wayne's CD collection. Hall dedicates tonight's reading to Night Train, Doolie, Heynow, Mr. Allen and Pops n'em from 103rd street, and confides that some memories don't rinse out.

John Keene is the author of the award-winning novel Annotations (New Directions), and, with artist Christopher Stackhouse, of the art-text dialogue SEISMOSIS (forthcoming from 1913 Press). He has published his fiction, poetry, essays, reviews, and translations in a wide variety of periodicals and anthologies, including African American Review, Aufgabe, Blithe House Quarterly, Encyclopedia, Hambone, Indiana Review, Kenyon Review, New American Poetry, Ploughshares, and the Washington Post Book Review. Among his honors are fellowships in fiction from the Massachusetts Artists Council and in poetry from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, and the New York Times Foundation; AGNI's John Cheever Short Fiction Prize; the Solo Press Poetry Prize; and five Pushcart Press Prize nominations. He has served as a guest editor for Blithe House Quarterly, and is an advisory editor for the Harrington Gay Men's Fiction Quarterly. He has taught at Brown and New York Universities, as well as at the Indiana Writers Conference and Middlebury College's Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Northwestern University.

Toni Asante Lightfoot is a writer, teacher, and activist living in Chicago, Illinois. A native of Washington, DC, Lightfoot started her poetry career performing in its cafes and jazz clubs. Along with the other members of The Modern Urban Griots, she co-wrote, directed, and starred in Everything I Never Told You Became a Poem and Jazz, Wine, and Poetry: An Almost Love Story. Alone as well as along with several groups, Lightfoot has performed all over the US, Canada, and Trinidad & Tobago, She has been published in several anthologies such as: Role Call (Third World Press), Beyond the Frontier (Black Classics Press) and is the co-editor of Dream of a Word (Tia Chucha Press). Her voice and poetry appears on numerous CDs. For more information, check her at out at www.myspace.com/toniasantelightfoot .